mornin’ pals, how are you?
i really enjoyed this bbc radio 3 documentary that came out at the weekend on the history of indian electronic music, hosted by paul purgas. it’s not only great for challenging the western-centric historiography of electronic music, but also because it really accurately portrays the sense of futuristic wonder that electronic music can provoke. the documentary is largely anchored around the discovery of some lost tapes of electronic music make at india’s new institute of design (NID) in the early 70s, using a then very expensive, and rare in india, moog synthesiser. a lot of the interviewees, former NID students, talk really poignantly about how amazed they were by the moog, hearing sounds they had never heard before. (it ends up being quite a sad tale though; the moog basically ends up not being used because it’s too expensive and risky to let students play too freely with it, and the university comes under a less open minded management, and ends up selling off the moog.)
what i was thinking through the doc, though, was: does, or even can, electronic music be futuristic in our current moment? electronic music really seems to have lost its futuristic capacity, to my ears anyway: even the most remarkably innovative stuff, by say, holly herndon or beatrice dillon, doesn’t sound or feel “new”. it’s amazing and impressive, but it doesn’t have that feeling of something being beamed in from an alien galaxy, an opening into a whole new world.
(this makes me think of the south bank in london: the brutalist architecture, to me at least, still feels incredibly futuristic, conjuring up all those modernist feelings of progress from the 50s/60s/70s, but this feeling is inevitably tampered with by the sheer fact that brutalism is a historical anachronism: a thing of the past. simply: brutalism feels new but no longer actually is. i get the same feeling listening to this old moog music, which is simultaneously futuristic and anachronistic.)
(there’s more to say here, but this is the kind of thing mark fisher and simon reynolds have already talked about far more eloquently than me, so i’ll signpost you to them)
back to the doc: if you want to listen to some of this old indian electro, first thing to check out is ten ragas to a disco beat (1982). as purgas notes in the documentary, this is really remarkable stuff, sounding like acid house at least 5/6 years before it started coming out of chicago.
it’s a music heavy rec day — next rec on the list today is this fantastic newsletter on outsider and experimental music, Tusk is Better Than Rumours. it provides loads of accessible guides to often quite challenging and imposing musicians and artists — i was reading the one on anton bruhin and at the end the guy running it gave away a self-compiled mixtape of his tracks, and i was just like, wow, that is the commitment to the avant-garde i like to see.
check it out; i ended up in a deep internet hole because of the one on anton bruhin and ended up listening to loads of his weird shit, like this crazy tape music that sounds like, in the newsletter’s words, “switching tv channels really fast in a cartoon world”.
last, i got a lot of good vibes from this jamie xx nts mix from last week. listened to it while doing a workout in the sun yesterday and had a blast. bounces between a lot of places genre-wise, but xx does a good job of holding it all together.
that’s all for today - keep sending recs, and another plug for my recently redesigned blog if you haven’t already checked it out.
stay safe pals.
jake x